


remembersome

by upheaval



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Gen, POV Miya Atsumu, Reconciliation, Siblings, an attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:13:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25808647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/upheaval/pseuds/upheaval
Summary: In my head, it only applies to you.Alternatively: Kiyoomi misses his sister, and Atsumu tries to repair the world.
Relationships: Miya Atsumu/Sakusa Kiyoomi
Comments: 12
Kudos: 95





	remembersome

**Author's Note:**

> hey everyone i'm fairly sure sakusa has a mentioned sister in canon but i might've just read the wrong translation so idk if he actually has a sister but. yeah
> 
> this fic is unbetaed so i apologize for grammar/spelling/etc. errors! i was too lazy to get a beta because i wanted to finish this asap so i can return back to daiya brainrot cold sweat emoji and also as another note this doesn't have a good (?) ending and it's unresolved so if that's not your jam then feel free to click away hehe

_Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,  
the world offers itself to your imagination,  
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—  
over and over announcing your place  
in the family of things. _

— Mary Oliver, "Wild Geese"

Kiyoomi keeps a photo in the corner of their living room.

He and his sister, framed by a black rim of wood. She rests her elbow on Kiyoomi’s head in front of the ocean. Her name is Nanae. Kiyoomi is eight in the photo. Nanae is seventeen. Their mother is behind the camera. They are in Okinawa. Kiyoomi doesn’t share anything else about them.

He checks up on the photo whenever he remembers its existence (in other words, often) and wipes the frame and the plastic, at times removing the image to brush away the dust that it has collected. Atsumu sees him sometimes in the middle of the night, rubbing at the corners of the chipping wooden frame with a rag. He would look up at him, eyes heavy, and utter a solemn _Atsumu_ , which would really mean _go back to sleep; we have an early morning tomorrow; don’t worry about it_ , to which Atsumu would sigh and return to bed because he has been trying not to pry.

He keeps his distance from the photo and Kiyoomi cleaning the photo. Despite his reputation as an insensitive, loudmouthed asshole, he holds his words when he needs to. He has been trying not to pry lately; he’s been making good on it, however curious he may be.

* * *

Kiyoomi is cleaning the photo again. Every time he does, that portion of the wall looks empty, like eight-year-old Kiyoomi and seventeen-year-old Nanae have somehow wormed themselves into their apartment by simply sitting on the wall.

The living room light is weak and makes Kiyoomi, 192 centimeters of lean muscle, appear sallow and fragile. Atsumu lingers for a while, taking in the screech of the crickets outside and the odor of roadkill coming from the window in the kitchen. He half-expected Kiyoomi to close it before they went to bed, but it’s still open, allowing such unpleasant sensations (humidity, dead squirrels, probably, et cetera) into the apartment.

“You should go to sleep,” Atsumu says. Kiyoomi looks up at him and his back is hunched. He wants to tell Atsumu to give him more time. He wants to eat the whole world and then some. Atsumu knows because he knows him.

“Later,” he insists. It always happens like this. Atsumu wouldn’t expect anything else.

* * *

Like clockwork, he does not sleep later.

The sun rises. Kiyoomi watches it from the ratty sofa Atsumu took from Hyogo.

Nothing else.

* * *

Kiyoomi drops the bomb on an unassuming weekday. It is some time in the early morning, and he shakes Atsumu awake to tell him Nanae is estranged, he thinks. Like any normal person, Atsumu’s reaction is, “What the fuck? She’s not dead?”

“I wanted to tell you earlier,” Kiyoomi says, not-at-all answering the question. “I just couldn’t bring myself to.”

Atsumu blinks and rubs his eyes. It’s no earlier than 4 AM. “Oh,” he manages. “Yep.”

Kiyoomi scowls. “I thought you’d want to know.”

“It is like, four in the morning.”

“It is.”

Atsumu groans, burying his head into a pillow. “Can we talk about this later?”

“Are you even going to remember by the time we wake up,” Kiyoomi grumbles, and returns to sleep.

Atsumu, despite his complaints, doesn’t fall asleep. He stays face-down for a while longer and furrows his eyebrows at Kiyoomi who has already fallen asleep, and wonders why he had to tell Atsumu about Nanae at the witching hour when he had an entire sixteen hours during the day, but it’s beyond him.

The sun is rising. Atsumu sees it through the openings in the blinds and takes notice of how time blurs in the early mornings. He has never made a habit of waking up early in the summer; there are no morning practices, which provides him no reason to wake up before noon. It feels like high school, except he wakes up next to Kiyoomi and he doesn’t have summer assignments to worry about. It’s awfully domestic, and he would rather die than admit he’s softened from it.

High-school Atsumu was sharp angles and an even sharper tongue. He squared his shoulders and nobody would be able to break him. He did all the breaking, and that was what kept the world spinning. Even Osamu agreed.

Present-day Atsumu is a different story. Of course he’s still himself, sharp-tongued and provocative, but high-school Atsumu and present-day Atsumu are fundamentally different people. Present-day Atsumu does things like watch Kiyoomi sleep while the sun rises. By doing that, the world has already stopped spinning, but it’s workable. Atsumu doesn’t need the world to be functional. He just asks that it saves space for him and Kiyoomi.

* * *

“Why the fuck is your sister estranged?” Atsumu asks, because he wants to know, and also because he never answered his question from before (see: “What the fuck?”). He has since forgotten his vow to not pry.

Kiyoomi scoffs. “Fuck if I know.” Atsumu is surprised to hear this answer. He expects a long-winded speech about the history of the Sakusa family and receives none of it. He wishes he could be relieved.

“What,” Atsumu says eloquently. The photo in the corner of the living room stares at him.

“I don't know why my sister is estranged.”

Atsumu blinks, then squints. “What,” he repeats.

“My parents never told me. I was nine when it happened,” Kiyoomi explains. It does not function well as an explanation. Atsumu is still confused, but more so concerned. “I guess she did something, but I wouldn’t know.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“I wish I could meet her.”

Kiyoomi sighs. “Me too.”

* * *

Kiyoomi removes the image this time. He wipes it down with the microfiber cloth that came free with a pair of Atsumu’s sunglasses and lays it down on the side table. It is noon. Atsumu is just about waking up.

“When you said that you don’t know why your sister is estranged,” he says, nestling himself into the corner of the sofa with a mug of coffee from the day before, “did you mean that you had no fucking clue, or did you mean that you didn’t remember.”

Kiyoomi doesn’t look up. “A little bit of both, probably. When I woke up that day, she was already gone. There was nothing left in her room.”

“What about your parents?”

“What about them?”

Atsumu sets the coffee down and lies flat. “Didn’t they say anything?”

Kiyoomi slides the photo back into the frame. “No. I asked and they just said to not worry about it.”

“What the fuck.”

“Right,” he says, and puts the frame back onto the wall. Everything is normal again. They eat brunch or some variation of it. The apartment smells like summer and whatever Kiyoomi uses to clean the toilet, and it smells really good. God bless Kiyoomi and his toilet cleaner.

Atsumu drains the rest of the coffee and leaves it on the side table, stares at the photo on the wall. He wonders where Nanae is. He wonders a lot of things. Kiyoomi settles beside him on the sofa, and it’s been a while since he has done this voluntarily. Atsumu is compelled to believe that Kiyoomi is getting sad, but he’s carried the photo around to every place he has lived in before and never mentioned getting sad, so Atsumu is more compelled to leave him be, which he has become surprisingly good at, although he doesn’t remember how it happened.

* * *

They got together a few years after Kiyoomi signed with the Black Jackals.

Kiyoomi confessed first. It was a weeknight in the dead of winter, and he drank out of his two-liter water jug and told Atsumu he liked him. It sounded like everything else he’d ever said, but Atsumu understood just as well, so they left the gym with the promise that they would work it out eventually. Later they leased an apartment in Osaka. Even later Kiyoomi hung the photo up in the corner of the living room.

It was a natural process.

Hinata came to visit their apartment first. He brought champagne and a large brioche, both of which were finished by noon the next day, courtesy of Atsumu and hungover Atsumu. He turned on the TV and sat in the corner of the ratty sofa from Hyogo and talked over the volleyball game as Atsumu drizzled champagne into a coffee mug from a high place. Kiyoomi sat in the other corner and focused on the volleyball game, and Atsumu finished his mug of champagne, wedged himself into the middle of the sofa, and shot Kiyoomi a sleazy smile, watching Hinata shift his eyes out of the corner of his vision.

Atsumu decided that night that he was in love with Sakusa Kiyoomi.

Kiyoomi had looped his arms around Atsumu’s waist, tucking his head in the divot of his shoulder, and Atsumu freaked out upon feeling his curls tickle his chin because really, he just looked so beautiful, even without seeing his face. It had been a first for Atsumu—to feel taller, not just bigger, because let’s face it: Atsumu may be bigger than Kiyoomi, but he is by no means taller and that’s a fact, so he was always the one who did the face-in-shoulder, rather than the opposite.

Kiyoomi woke up the next morning to the alarm and shook Atsumu awake because he was not waking up and Atsumu told him he loved him to which Kiyoomi declared that he loved Atsumu first. And then they brushed their teeth in their bathroom that was as small as a large closet and then they ate breakfast and then they missed the subway and arrived at practice late and then Coach got mad at them and they turned to each other and giggled, and then, and then, and then.

* * *

Kiyoomi finds his sister on Facebook.

Atsumu lies beside him in bed, and he’s been telling Kiyoomi to stop using his phone in the dark in consideration for his eyes, and Kiyoomi doesn’t listen but at least he finds his sister. Atsumu doesn’t see why he didn’t do this earlier, but a part of him understands that Kiyoomi has his own way of doing things, and maybe he is just afraid. Atsumu also doesn’t know why he would be afraid, but he doesn’t question it either.

“She’s here,” Kiyoomi mumbles. He faces away from Atsumu and toward his phone which is an unsafe distance from his face. Atsumu thinks he will need glasses soon.

“Yeah?”

“A professor at Osaka University.”

“Really?”

Kiyoomi sets his phone aside, turning on his back. “She was very smart when I was young.”

Atsumu laughs and shuffles his hands under his head. “You make it sound like she’s dead.”

“She might as well have been.”

“Oh.” He quiets. “I’m sorry.”

Kiyoomi turns to face Atsumu. It’s evident in his face that he has worn himself away over the past weeks—his wrinkles have been more visible these days, and his skin has paled despite the heavy sunlight outside. He keeps in shape though, so despite everything he is still built and sturdy and the same man Atsumu has known since high school.

“Don’t be.” Atsumu nods, assurances at the tip of his tongue, but they’re deformed and messy and nothing assuring.

He has never been an optimist, but this is a given. His mother taught him just about everything he knows about optimism, and while he can improve, he will only be a realist at best. Kiyoomi doesn’t seem to mind, but he is a pessimist too, so Atsumu can’t help but think they don’t compliment each other as well as they should, even though his mother says they are perfect for each other. But again, he has never been an optimist. He will never see things the way she does.

“You should message her,” he offers instead. “I bet she misses you.”

“I might.” Atsumu hears him shift. “She’s probably busy nowadays.”

“She’d make time for you.”

Kiyoomi bites the inside of his cheek. “I hope.”

“She would.”

* * *

“She has a daughter,” Kiyoomi says, leaning against the bathroom sink as Atsumu brushes his teeth. “She’s seventeen. Her name is Miyuu.”

Atsumu’s hand pauses. “Huh. Your sister gave birth when she was—what, eighteen?”

“Yeah. That makes me feel young.” Kiyoomi pulls at his fingers. “Can you believe I have a niece? That’s crazy.”

“I think you’d be a good uncle.” Atsumu grins and toothpaste falls onto his shirt. Kiyoomi wipes it off with a square of toilet paper and deposits it in the trash can.

He looks at his reflection in the mirror and tousles his hair. “Would I?” He furrows his eyebrows and his moles move. “I’m not good with teenagers. What do they even like?”

“I don’t remember anything from high school that doesn’t involve volleyball.”

“Your entire high school life involved volleyball.”

Atsumu hums in agreement, wiping his mouth clean of toothpaste. “Yours too,” he says, “but we still don’t know what teenage girls like. Manga? Boys?”

Kiyoomi scowls and combs through Atsumu’s hair with his fingers. “You’d make a horrible uncle.”

“Which is why I pray every day that ‘Samu won’t have kids.”

“Atsumu. He is gay.”

* * *

Thirty-five-year-old Sakusa Nanae looks the same as Sakusa Nanae in the photo. Kiyoomi shows Atsumu a picture of her one day as he cleans the photo, less meticulously this time. She has the same straight black hair that Kiyoomi doesn’t have and the same spotless face, and Atsumu isn’t even sure if it’s possible, but she looks happier.

“Doesn’t she?” Atsumu asks, distracted and nonchalant.

“She what?”

“Look happier.”

Kiyoomi brushes dust off the frame. “Yeah. She does.” He pauses, placing the photo back into its place on the wall. “I’m glad.”

“You should meet up with her sometime, maybe meet her daughter.”

“I want to. She says she’s busy though,” he sighs, nestling into a chair, sitting with his legs crossed. “Hopefully she can come over within the next month.”

“I thought you’d want to make it more private. Like in a fancy restaurant or something.”

Kiyoomi gives him a look and it’s something like exasperation. “Do you think I don’t want her to meet you too?”

Atsumu stops, then breaks into a grin. “Aw, I love you too,” he says, making a wretched kissy-face. Kiyoomi shifts backward on instinct, crossing his arms.

“When did I say that,” Kiyoomi refutes, expressionless, despite the way he turns his face away.

Atsumu swats at Kiyoomi’s arm. “Just now,” he answers as if stating the obvious. “Are you gonna cook for her?”

Kiyoomi pinches his nose bridge and looks at Atsumu. “Does your brother deliver.”

“Yes, but that’s beside the point. You’re good at cooking,” Atsumu says pointedly. “I think she’d appreciate it because if I lost contact with my younger brother of nine years I would feel appreciative if he—”

“—Atsumu. Shut the fuck up.”

* * *

When Nanae arrives with her daughter, Kiyoomi forgoes the mask. Atsumu believes it’s a combination of hope and a brave front and he has done the same countless times, but this is Kiyoomi. This is Kiyoomi who wears a facemask everywhere and more importantly Kiyoomi who keeps his distance in every sense from unfamiliar people. One could argue that Nanae is the last person who could be considered unfamiliar, but Atsumu would argue back that it has been seventeen years, which means seventeen years of evolution and metamorphosis, which means seventeen years strangers.

The ratty sofa from Hyogo is not something Atsumu would like to show Kiyoomi’s sister, but he’d insisted on inviting her over to their apartment for what Atsumu assumes is the same reason why he doesn’t wear a mask. When Nanae knocks on the door with a fancy gilded gift bag, he resists the urge to throw a tarp over the sofa and call it a day.

“Sakusa Nanae, nice to meet you,” is the first thing she says to Atsumu. She is a few centimeters shorter than him, carrying herself with a straight back and a poised countenance. She dresses well too, much better than anything both Atsumu and Kiyoomi could muster, with a pretty blouse and tapered pants, the spitting image of a confident woman. She nods over to her daughter who is also egregiously tall but significantly shier, gaze flickering in every direction, hands picking at the hem of her shirt.

Her daughter introduces herself as with a deep bow, and she looks nothing like her mother despite looking every bit like her mother.

Kiyoomi cooked this evening. Atsumu helped chop raw vegetables and nothing else, as much as he wanted to boast, but Kiyoomi did all the heating and seasoning on his own. He is a good cook—not as good as Osamu, but better than Atsumu and the rest of their team except _maybe_ Meian. Nanae appears veritably impressed and Miyuu expressionless, but Atsumu can’t blame her. She’s lived seventeen years just fine with no uncle. Nothing changes.

“How’ve you been these years?” Nanae asks Kiyoomi, meeker now that she’s talking to him. The use of ‘years’ makes both her and Kiyoomi wince, and the air is so thick Atsumu could reach out and take a bite.

“I’ve been good. Better. Are you tenure-track at the university?”

“Yes,” she says, nodding as she chews on a piece of salmon. “Kiyoomi, this is really good.”

Kiyoomi shakes his head and brushes off the compliment. He has always been too modest, Atsumu arguably having the most experience with this. “Have you been in contact. With mom and dad, I mean,” he says, picking at his rice and not looking up.

“No,” she replies, and Miyuu shifts in her seat and scratches her cheek. “We haven’t spoken since I left.”

“Ah.”

Miyuu excuses herself from the table, sitting stiffly in the corner of the sofa Kiyoomi prefers, and Nanae gives her a faraway glance before resigning herself and focusing back on the table. Atsumu sits still for a long time but decides to join Miyuu on the sofa and tries to make small talk to comfort her in his own weird ways, sitting in the other corner of the sofa. Atsumu regrets it a little bit, seeing as Kiyoomi tenses up every so often and he can’t be there to rub his thumb over the back of Kiyoomi’s hand whenever he gets nervous. Nanae has lowered her voice now that only she and Kiyoomi are at the table alone, and it’s just out of Atsumu’s hearing range and he knows Miyuu is probably thankful for it, but he’s still curious.

“Atsumu, Miyuu-san,” Kiyoomi calls after an indeterminate amount of time talking at the table.

Atsumu snaps out of his stupor. “Yeah?” he says, making his way back.

“It’s getting late,” Kiyoomi replies, quieter now, and only to Atsumu. “I should walk her out.” Atsumu looks at him worriedly and nods, patting the space between his shoulder blades. He trails the mother-daughter pair out of the apartment and shuts the door behind him, and in those minutes he’s gone, Atsumu realizes that seventeen years is indeed enough to make strangers out of family.

“What’d she tell you?” Atsumu asks when Kiyoomi comes back. “Did you find out about—y’know.”

Kiyoomi crumples on the sofa eyebrows furrowed and tucks his knees into his chest. “My mom kicked her out because she was pregnant. My dad didn’t do anything about it even though he loved her so much and you’d be able to tell but she seems so different now and I know she was trying to reach out again but she’s just not the same anymore.” He squeezes his eyes shut. “It’s like I don’t know her anymore.”

Atsumu can’t find any words that could sound right off his tongue, and he’s helpless and pessimistic all over again, but there’s nothing much he can do. He knows he’s tried which makes everything worse because he tried and he failed and he wishes he’d inherited more of his mother’s genes because then he would have made everything better, even by a small margin.

“I’m sorry,” he tries. “It’s not your fault.”

Kiyoomi looks up, chuckling. “Since when do you apologize?”

“Since forever, because I’m not an asshole!”

“Well,” Kiyoomi says after a moment, “at least she’s successful now. I think Dad would be proud. He talked about her potential a lot when I was young.”

Atsumu scratches his face, scooting closer to Kiyoomi. “I wish I knew what I could say to make you feel better.”

“This is my own problem anyway. You’re not obligated to cheer me up.”

“Does that matter?” Atsumu stands up. “I’m gonna be here for you until you chase me away, whether you like it or not,” he declares. It’s a haughty claim that Atsumu himself is surprised about, hanging in the air like an offering.

Kiyoomi gives him a long look then looks away. It is dark outside, neither of them having moved to close the curtains.

There is still the photo. Kiyoomi stares at it without moving.

* * *

“How in the world do you talk so naturally,” Kiyoomi asks, one night in bed, folding his hands over his stomach. The city is asleep around them. There is only Atsumu.

“Do I?”

Kiyoomi forgets the curtains are closed and tries to look out the window. “Answer the question, Atsumu.”

“It’s not like I plan my words out. I just say stuff and hope I don’t sound like a dick,” he says. It’s funny because he usually sounds like a dick. Kiyoomi laughs. Please laugh.

“How.”

Atsumu twists his head to look at him. “What do you mean?”

“How do you just ‘say stuff’? How do you even stand me? I don’t ‘say stuff.’ I’m either boring or an asshole, and I think I’m leaning towards boring these days.” His hands sweat and he does not look at Atsumu. It’s the safest option which makes it the right option.

“I stand you very well which means I don’t care if you’re boring or an asshole because I’m boring and an asshole and we match. So fuck that. And everything else because I know this is about your sister and I know you’re trying which is good.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s not your problem if she doesn’t reciprocate. Then she’d be the asshole. Not you. Never you,” Atsumu says. Somehow it is easier to speak.

“I wish I could live by that. I’d be very fortunate if I could.” Kiyoomi closes his eyes.

Atsumu grabs Kiyoomi’s hand under the blankets and stares at the ceiling. “We’d both be lucky if we manage to live by that someday.”

“Haven’t you done it already?”

Atsumu chuckles dryly. “In my head, it only applies to you.”

“In _my_ head, it only applies to _you_.” Kiyoomi runs his thumb over Atsumu’s knuckles. The world screeches to a stop. No one is real besides Atsumu and Kiyoomi. Or Kiyoomi and Atsumu. In whichever you want to arrange their names, they are themselves, or each other, or themselves.

“Maybe you and your sister can go to Okinawa again. That might help,” Atsumu tries.

“Maybe.”

**Author's Note:**

> heyyy if you made it to the end tysm for reading this train wreck that was really supposed to be happy and then daiya brainrot hit too hard and i lost all my motivation to write haikyuu so it got awkward ;-;
> 
> if anyone wants to talk on twitter i'm @sakubfs see you all next time ^__^


End file.
